'Godfather of multiculturalism' Stuart Hall dies aged 82

Stuart Hall's writing on race, gender, sexuality and identity was considered groundbreaking. Photograph: David Levene

Academics, writers and and politicians have paid tribute to one
of Britain's leading intellectuals, the sociologist and cultural
theorist Stuart Hall, who has died age 82.
Known as the "godfather
of multiculturalism", Hall had a huge influence on academic, political
and cultural debates for over six decades.
Jamaican-born Hall was professor of sociology at the Open University
from 1979 to 1997, topping off an academic career that began as a
research fellow in Britain's first centre for cultural studies, set up
by Richard Hoggart at the University of Birmingham in 1964. Hall would
later lead the centre and was seen as a key figure in the development of
cultural studies as an academic discipline.
Martin Bean,
vice-chancellor of The Open University said: "He was a committed and
influential public intellectual of the new left, who embodied the spirit
of what the OU has always stood for: openness, accessibility, a
champion for social justice and of the power of education to bring
positive change in peoples' lives."
His impact was felt far
outside the realms of academia, however. His writing on race, gender,
sexuality and identity, and the links between racial prejudice and the
media in the 1970s, was considered groundbreaking.
Diane Abbott,
the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington said: "For me he was
a hero. A black man who soared above and beyond the limitations imposed
by racism and one of the leading cultural theorists of his generation."
Later he wrote for and was associated closely with the journal Marxism Today
in the 1980s. The journal's critique of Thatcherism - a term that Hall
is said to have coined - challenged traditional leftwing thinking that
held that culture was determined purely by economic forces, a view that
would come to influence the Labour party leaders Neil Kinnock and Tony
Blair.
David Lammy, MP for Tottenham paid tribute to his friend's
intellectual range and prescience: "He was one of those 'cut-through'
academics that could write in an incredibly erudite, Ivy-league way but
who could also explain things in a way that could be understood by the
ordinary man and woman. He was a thinker that you could not ignore."
Lammy
said Hall would often come to visit him at the House of Commons,
offering counsel and advice but was never afraid to berate him where he
felt Lammy was wrong: "He was someone I had huge respect for, a real
father figure. He was a kind, generous, wonderful man and a great, great
role model".
In one of Hall's last interviews,
with the Guardian two years ago, Hall expressed pessimism about
politics generally and the Labour party specifically. "The left is in
trouble. It has not got any ideas, it has not got any independent
analysis of its own, and therefore it has got no vision. It just takes
the temperature: 'Whoa, that's no good, let's move to the right.' It has
no sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way
people see things."
Hall received a traditional "English"
schooling in Jamaica before winning a scholarship to Oxford University
in 1951. He took a degree in English but later abandoned a PhD on Henry
James to concentrate on politics, setting up the influential New Left
Review journal with the leftwing academics Raymond Williams and EP
Thompson.
A documentary about his life by the film-maker John
Akomfrah, called The Stuart Hall Project, was shown in cinemas in
September. Writing in the Observer, the journalist Tim Adams wrote of the film:
"You come to see how pivotal his [Hall's] voice has been in shaping the
progressive debates of our times – around race, gender and sexuality –
and how an increasingly conservative culture has worked lately to
marginalise his nuanced understanding of this country."
Hall had been suffering ill health for some time, and had retreated from public life.

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Stuart Hall remembered by David Lammy

3 February 1932–10 February 2014David Lammy on the cultural theorist’s intellectual rigour and authority, his early influence on his ideas via the Open University and their subsequent friendship

Stuart Hall: ‘He was incredibly well mannered. He wouldn’t raise his voice because that wasn’t the done thing.’ Photograph: David Levene

Stuart Hall had a sort of revolutionary fire in his soul. He gave the lie in some senses to that idea of Gil Scott-Heron’s, that “the revolution will not be televised”. I grew up in Tottenham in the 1970s and early 1980s, my mother worked nights and I would often be up late watching the Open University TV programmes that came on after the regular channels finished. Stuart was broadcasting in the age of Alf Garnett and Love Thy Neighbour and contradicting every single stereotype that they presented. I grew up without a father, and was completely fascinated by this powerful, highly articulate male talking softly to me at a time when I probably should have been in bed.

There was, above all, a tremendous modernity and countercultural excitement to Stuart’s language – a modernity that challenged everything I was hearing in school, on the news, and in everyday life. There is a generation of social workers, teachers, academics, media studies students, political activists and many others who lived and breathed those OU courses, who were deeply influenced by him.

I met Stuart and got to know him well when I became an MP. He sought me out, and would come to the Commons for tea. We had a lot of contact when I was culture minister and he was chair of Rivington Place – the east London cultural institution he championed devoted to black archives, photography and art. I was very pleased to help him with support and funding for that fantastic project. He seemed proud that I was the minister at the time and instinctively understood the need for projects like these.

Stuart became a paternal kind of presence in my life. He had a quiet but affecting voice and an incredible authority and rigour of thought. He was not a didactic, authoritarian figure, but came across as a very open individual, a lover of jazz and of art, as well as politics. He was a guiding influence, authoritative and thought-provoking but always incredibly well-mannered. He wouldn’t raise his voice because that wasn’t the done thing. Stuart would listen hard to what you said and question everything. He was very quick to pick up the phone after the 2011 riots, for example, and gently question me on aspects of my response that he disagreed with.

Being born in Jamaica gave Stuart a totally different perspective on Britain, his adopted home. He was acutely aware of his own mixed heritage: African, Portuguese, West Indian, Jewish, British, and that context made his critique of otherness extremely personal.

History will be generous to Stuart as a public intellectual and polymath. In the theatre of academic greats, I would place him alongside Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband. His work was inter-disciplinary and leaves a strong legacy in the fields of cultural studies, media, anthropology, social history, and gender studies – a remarkable contribution to how we now analyse the world around us. He gave us the idea of multiculturalism as we understand it, of multiple identities. He not only coined the term “Thatcherism”, but he wrote the seminal deconstruction of it before Thatcher even came to power. He offered, too, the sharpest critique of the problems with British socialism that allowed Thatcherism to prosper. Much of that work formed the basis of New Labour, of which, of course, he later also became very critical.

Stuart’s memorial service at the end of November was, naturally, a very moving celebration of a remarkable life. His daughter paid him a wonderful tribute as a father and a soulmate, and intellectual colleagues, artists and writers, those whom he had taught and inspired and guided from across the world, joined to pay him full and heartfelt tribute. It felt a privilege to be there. Who could ask for more?